Quote 1192
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The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.
Ironically, the insistence that doctrines do not matter is really a doctrine itself. The Reason for God (8)
The Christian Gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me. The Reason for God (181)
God loves all in some ways, and God loves some in all ways.
To know that God knows everything about me and yet loves me is indeed my ultimate consolation.
Faith is not primarily a function of how you feel. Faith is living out and believing what truth is despite what you feel.
There is tremendous relief in knowing his love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery can disillusion him about me.
It is the love of Christ, i. e. his love to us which passes knowledge. It is infinite; not only because it inheres in an infinite subject, but because the condescension and sufferings to which it led, and the blessings which it secures for its objects, are beyond our comprehension. This love of Christ, though it surpasses the power of our understanding to comprehend, is still a subject of experimental knowledge. We may know how excellent, how wonderful, how free, how disinterested, how long-suffering, how manifold and constant, it is, and that it is infinite. And this is the highest and most sanctifying of all knowledge. Those who thus know the love of Christ towards them, purify themselves even as he is pure.
The covenant is "I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God" (Exodus 6:7). The question is this: In light of the constant failures of the people to live up to their covenant promises to serve God, is the covenant conditional or unconditional? Will God say that it is conditional? ("Because you broke the covenant, I will cut you off, curse you, and abandon you forever.") Or will he say it is unconditional? ("Though you have rejected me, I will never wholly abandon you, but I will remain with you.") Which is it?....then Jesus comes, and as we see him crying "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" we realize the answer. Is the covenant between God and his people conditional or unconditional? Yes. Yes. Jesus came and fulfilled the conditions so God could love us unconditionally.Preaching, 72
In our culture, divine judgement is one of Christianity's most offensive doctrines. The Reason for God (69)
When a Russian cosmonaut returned from space and reported that he had not found God, C.S. Lewis responded that this was like Hamlet going into the attic of his castle looking for Shakespeare. If there is a God, he wouldn't be another object in the universe that could be put in a lab and analyzed with empirical methods. He would relate to us the way a playwright relates to the characters in his play. We (characters) might be able to know quite a lot about the playwright, but only to the degree the author chooses to put information about himself in the play. The Reason for God (122)
A threefold love of God is commonly held; or rather there are three degrees of one and the same love. First, there is the love of 𝘣𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 by which God willed good to the creature from eternity; second, the love of 𝘣𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 by which he does good to the creature in time according to his good will; third, the love of 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘺 by which he delights himself in the creature on account of the rays of his image seen in them. By the love of 𝘣𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦, he loved us before we were; by the love of 𝘣𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦, he loves us as we are; and by the love of 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘺, he loves us when we are (viz., renewed after his image). By the first he elects us; by the second, he redeems and sanctifies us; but by the third he gratuitously rewards us as holy and just. Institutes of Elenctic Theology, III.8,5
God loves us more than father, mother, friend, or anyone else could love, and even more than we are able to love ourselves.
None walk so evenly with God as they who are assured of the love of God.
divine love, by contrast, is not reactive but creative: God does not find that which is lovely and then move out in love toward it; something is made lovely by the fact that God first sets his love upon it. He does not look at sinful human beings and see among the mass of people some who are intrinsically more righteous or holy than others and thus find himself attracted to them. Rather, the lesson of the cross is that God chooses that which is unlovely and repulsive, unrighteous and with no redeeming quality, and lavishes his saving love in Christ upon it.
The greatest sorrow and burden you can lay on the Father, the greatest unkindness you can do to him is not to believe that he loves you.
moralistic application doesn't work in the long term. I'm afraid a sermon that just tells people they should be generous because they have to is not dealing with the fears, false hopes, and lusts for approval and control that make people unwilling to give more. So they might give more once or twice but not actually become more generous... Unless you get to Jesus, you are just beating on their willsPreaching, 240
Without the help of the Holy Spirit, I believe all of us tend naturally toward being mainly warm and gentle or mainly forceful and authoritative in the pulpit. We must recognize our imbalance and seek the Lord for growth into the fullness of his holy character.Preaching, 200
the Achilles' heel of [the harm principle] is the assumption that we all know what "harm" is or that it can be defined without recourse to deep beliefs about right and wrong. One person says that it harms no one for a man to consume pornography privately in his own home. Others counter, however, that pornography will shape how he talks and acts with others, especially with women.Preaching, 141
Western secularists insist that their view of equal rights is simply self-evident to any rational person, but non-Western cultures do not agree... Because truly secular people can't admit the source of their main moral values in their Christian history, it makes them imperialistic.Preaching, 151
Another important grace-event pattern is the "order" of the Exodus and the lawgiving. God did not first give the law and then deliver the people. He first delivered the people and then he gave them the law. Thus we are not saved by the law but saved for the law.Preaching, 83
Mark is intentionally recapping the Jonah episode in Mark 4. He uses nearly identical words and phrases. Both Jesus and Jonah are in a boat. Both are in storms described in similar terms. Both boats are filled with others who are terrified of death. Both groups wake the sleeping prophets angrily, rebuking them. Both storms are miraculously calmed and the companions saved. And both stories conclude with the men in the boats more terrified after the storm is stilled than they were before.Preaching, 78
Hughes Old shows us that the original preaching of the church in its first five centuries used the lectio continua method - consecutive, verse-by-verse exposition through whole books of the Bible, taking years to bring the congregation through great swaths of biblical material.Preaching, 39
[Hughes Oliphant Old] names five basic types of sermons that he discerns over the centuries, which he calls expository, evangelistic, catechetical, festal, and prophetic.Preaching, 29
In the course of expounding a biblical text the Christian preacher should compare and contrast with the foundational beliefs of the culture, which are usually invisible to people inside it, in order to help people understand themselves more fully. If done rightly it can lead people to say to themselves, Oh, so that's why I tend to think and feel that way. This can be one of the most liberating and catalytic steps in a person's journey to faith in Christ.Preaching, 19-20
Top Authors
1. Charles Spurgeon (132)
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2. Thomas Watson (121)
3. J.C. Ryle (116)
4. John Calvin (104)
5. J.I. Packer (89)
6. John Piper (86)
7. George Swinnock (75)
8. A.W. Pink (68)
9. Louis Berkhof (63)
10. John Flavel (58)
11. B.B. Warfield (58)
12. C.S. Lewis (55)
13. John Owen (54)
14. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (53)
15. Gerald Bray (50)
16. Francis Schaeffer (49)
17. R.C. Sproul (46)
18. Thomas Brooks (46)
19. Matthew Henry (45)
20. Francis Turretin (43)
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